I’m just back from two weeks in Tuscany, slap bang in the middle of Chiantishire. Before you hit command-W and wish me the pox in a fit of schadenfreude, it rained every single day. In fact, it’s rained pretty much every day there for five weeks, proving utterly true those proverbs that seem to exist in every language about how rain on just one unassuming day in May can completely bugger up your tan.

So what’s a girl and her mum to do? Well, close the kitchen door, put the telly on with the particularly italian programming blend of boobs and gastronomy – and cook!

This recipe is adapted from a wonderful book called “Ricette di Osterie d’Italia - I Dolci” published by the Slow Food guys. It’s a real insight into the way Italians cook their desserts – very simple ingredients mostly based on nuts, lemons and dried fruits, combined in perfectly honed ways to create subtle but delicious flavours, never overly sweet.

The crostata that follows (a really rich pastry topped with an easy creme patisserie and fresh peaches) was a doddle but was so impressive that we kept eating just to make sure we’d tasted it right.

For the pastry:
300g 00 flour
1 egg and 2 yolks
150g caster sugar
100g butter, very soft
zest of 1 lemon
pinch of salt
1/2 a sachet of italian lievito per dolci, which is probably equivalent to a heaped teaspoon of baking powder

Sift the flour into a large bowl and mix in the sugar, baking powder and the salt. Into the middle put all the other ingredients at once, and mix with a wooden spoon and then your hands to get a rich dough. Cover with clingfilm and leave to rest in the fridge for half an hour. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

For the crema pasticciera:
3 tablespoons flour
5 egg yolks
50g sugar
250ml milk

While the pastry is resting, make the crema pasticciera by heating the milk until nearly boiling. In another saucepan off the heat beat the yolks with the sugar until dissolved, then add the flour, and finally the hot milk, stirring continuously. Put this saucepan over a low flame (or use a bain marie) to bring it to boiling point, and cook for 3 minutes until well thickened.

For the peaches:
500g peaches, blanched in boiling water to peel them, and sliced into quarters or eighths, depending on size

Prepare a tart tin with fluted sides by buttering and flouring it, and lining the base with baking parchment. Roll out the pastry on a very well floured surface – this amount of pastry gives more than enough to line a 28cm tin, but if you have a different size, you can use the extra to lay crisscross strips on top, or make jam crostate with the left over bits. The pastry is really rich, and so fairly impossible to get cleanly into the tin. Mine was a complete patchwork, but came out absolutely fine, just remember that it will expand a fair bit due to the baking powder, so you don’t need to leave it very thick.

When your tin is lined, cover it evenly with the crema pasticciera. If your peaches are very juicy you might want to take steps to make sure the base doesn’t get too soggy – I sprinkled a handful of crushed amaretti biscuits over this cream layer which worked great. Then arrange the quartered peaches in concentric rings over the top. Bake at 180°C for 30 minutes – you may need to protect the pastry edges from getting too brown at some point, just use some aluminium foil.

I adore peas, probably because they’re one of the few foods that one can feel totally non-guilty about eating frozen. (I’m sure I could google a study showing that, in fact, frozen peas are bad for you and/or the work of the devil but I prefer to remain in ignorance, thanks very much.)

When my sister-in-law cooks a roast lunch, this is how she makes them:

Finely chop an onion and stick of celery, and sauté slowly in a glug of olive oil until soft. Now add some diced pancetta (since they’re frozen peas, I’m sure you’re allowed to use those handy packets of lardons) and fry that too until cooked. Then add in your peas straight from the freezer with a very small amount of water, just so they have a little steam to breathe in. You can cook these as gently or fiercely as the timing for the rest of the roast dictates (and you can reheat in the microwave), so it’s a zero-stress vegetable.

Firstly, a salsa verde, a simple and fresh accompaniment to grilled meats. Put 2 anchovies, a tiny bit of garlic (no more than 1/4 of a clove) and 4 small gherkins in a food processor, and whiz until finely chopped (or of course, do it the old-fashioned way with a knife!). Then add in a small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, basil and mint, and pulse sparingly until just chopped. Doing the processing in two stages avoids the harder ingredients being under-chopped and the herbs dissolving into a nasty puree. Tip the mixture into a bowl, and bring together with a tablespoon of wine vinegar and some good glugs of olive oil. Season to taste. We ate last night with grilled lamb chops, a perfect spring evening meal.

Second, an idea picked up today from one of my favourite restaurants, Trattoria dei Cacciatori, just outside Milan. We ate a plate of culatello served with a pear poached it in water with white wine and just a little aniseed (no sugar, it wasn’t sweet). It would be delicious with prosciutto or speck too.

No, really! This easy combination of carrots, beetroot and herbs is the only way I’ve ever managed to get them down. I used pre-cooked beetroot from the supermarket, which I’m fairly sure falls on the “sensible shortcut” spectrum of prepared food use (as opposed to the “New Delia” lunatic side. Seriously, tinned minced lamb!?).

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Peel your carrots, top and tail them and then boil, whole, in some salted water until just tender, about 10 minutes. I used a mix of sizes and shapes so it doesn’t have to be precise, but the smaller the tastier. Remove the carrots from the water and put in a mixing bowl with the cooked beetroot. Cut the carrots into rough thirds, and the beetroot into quarters. Pour in a glug each of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and orange juice, a couple of squashed cloves of garlic, some herbs (rosemary and sage worked for me) and season. Give it a good mix around, and then tip out into a roasting dish and put in the oven for half an hour. Great with pork chops.

I’ve got a really atrocious reputation for making scones. The one time I presented my husband with a batch his description was something like “plutonium-filled depth charges”. So, not great then.

But today, I tried a new recipe and they came out brilliantly – my better half could only come up with “crumbly” as a criticism (I can live with that!), and he had to go back for seconds just to be sure. They were light, delicious and golden, and the secret, according to Nigella, is the Cream of Tartar. I’ve no idea what’s in this mysterious substance, but as soon as the scones go into a really hot oven they immediately start billowing up. The best thing about scones? Only 10 minutes in the oven and by the time you’ve split them open and covered them in jam they’re ready to eat.

Heat the oven to 220°C, and don’t be tempted to put the scones in until it’s hit that mark. Sift 250g flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 good heaped teaspoon bicarbonate of soda and 2 heaped teaspoons of cream of tartar. Dice 75g of cold butter and rub in with your fingertips until it’s all combined and looks like crumbs. At this point, you can get fancy and add a small handful of dried fruit or some grated cheese. Then tip 150ml of milk into the bowl, mix just enough to bring everything stickily together and tip out onto a floured surface. I don’t want to say “knead” the mixture but just use your hands to make the dough into a coherent whole – I needed to sprinkle just a little flour in order to remove a bit of moisture. Then flatten it to about an inch, inch-and-a-half high and make six scone shapes. You can use a cutter, but I didn’t have one handy and just used a knife to cut rough wedges. Place the scones on a greased baking sheet, and brush the tops with a little beated egg. Bung in the very hot oven for 10 minutes until they are puffed up and golden.

Makes six, a perfect Sunday afternoon quantity for two very greedy people. Oh, sorry, no picture – just the crumbs left.

This recipe is adapted from:

“The Kitchen Diaries” (Nigel Slater)
I must spend hours reading and re-reading cookbooks, mostly for pleasure but quite often for those moments of desperation where not a single recipe is right for what you feel like eating. On a day when we’re feeling most definitely under the weather, and time seems to be going backwards rapidly into winter, this recipe, hitherto completely ignored, jumped out from the page. This is a silky, rather than bolstering lasagna, where the textures of vegetables, pasta and sauce melt into each other, making the individually strong flavours come together.

Not a dish to throw together this one – there are three components, the bechamel, pesto and mushroom mixture – so it probably takes a good two hours from start to finish. (I had to run to the supermarket for pine nuts, so it’s a bit difficult to judge). However, the pesto just requires turning on a food processor, so if a bechamel doesn’t daunt you, then all there is to do is a bit of chopping and sautéeing for the mushrooms. Then comes the fun bit of layering the ingredients in the dish – I always use my oven-proof pyrex dish that I use for trifle too as I love seeing the different layers waiting for the final meld. Then it’s ready for the oven, at which point there’s time to open a self-congratulatory bottle of red wine and put your feet up for half an hour before lunch. There’s nothing worse than eating when not relaxed, and nothing better than the calming knowledge of having a dish cooking to perfection in the oven. Leave the washing up until later, and let the wonderful aromas of pesto and parmesan waft around the house until everyone’s ready to eat.

Technorati Tags: baking, basil, cooking, food, food and drink, home cooking, lasagna, mushroom, nigel slater, pasta, pesto, vegetarian, recipe

As with any dish of this kind, quantities are a bit vague, and really a function of how big your dish is or how big your appetite. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a bit less pesto, or if you end up with extra layers of pasta to fit everything in – cooking time in the oven is really forgiving (anything from 30 to 55 minutes) as long as the individual components are cooked properly to begin with. Just make sure it’s bubbling and brown and it will be great, and of course you could always prepare it in advance and cook it from cold for longer.

For the bechamel:
1 litre whole milk
3 heaped tablespoons flour
45g butter

For the pesto:
60g pine nuts
2 big bunches basil, giving about 4 handfuls of leaves
4 tablespoons grated parmesan
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled

For the sautéed mushrooms:
A thick slice of butter
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
500g mushrooms, sliced
1 handful chopped parsley
10g porcini mushrooms
2 tablespoons grated parmesan

Lasagne sheets, preferably the type that doesn’t need precooking to make your life easier

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Start with the mushrooms. Sauté the onions and garlic in the butter over a medium heat for around 20 minutes until definitely soft and transparent. Meanwhile cover the porcini in around 100ml of boiling water. After the onions have softened, add the mushrooms, porcini with their cooking water, parsley and a couple of tablespoons grated parmesan. Cook with the lid half on, allowing quite a lot of moisture to escape, for around 20 minutes, until the mushrooms are coloured and nice and soft.

During this sauté time, you can make the pesto by putting all the ingredients in a food processor, and processing it until it forms a paste. Don’t worry too much about the consistency (too dry, too wet), as it will blend into the bechamel during cooking.

Prepare the bechamel by melting the butter in a saucepan, and then cooking in the flour as a roux for a few minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the milk gradually until it has all been incorporated. Return to the heat and cook, stirring fairly assiduously, for 10 to 15 minutes until glossy and thickened.

Now my favourite bit: find an ovenproof dish around 20×25cm. Ladle in a bit of the bechamel to cover the bottom, then put a layer of lasagna sheets. Follow this with half the mushroom mixture (if it is still very liquidy, then lift out just the mushrooms with a slotted spoon). Follow with a quarter of the bechamel. Now a layer of pasta, the rest of the mushrooms, another quarter of the bechamel, and another layer of pasta. Spread the pesto over this final pasta layer, and top with the rest of the bechamel. Give a good grating of parmesan over the top, and bake for around 30-40 minutes until there are browned bits on top.

I adore quiche, in a way that I’m sure isn’t quite normal. It was so popular in the dinner party repertoire of middle-class Britain in the 70’s that its effect is quite clearly still rattling around the national psyche of the fairly young. I wasn’t around in those blackforest gateau years, but even so, there’s a thread of quiche running through my life, from my mum’s (rigorously with wholewheat pastry and sliced tomatoes on top), to Grandma’s (salmon or broccoli, on very cold plates) to Marks and Sparks’ (with free-range eggs, during my workfest in the City of London).

Quiche lorraine is, predictably, my ultimate favourite. With its combination of the pale wobbly custard spiked saltily with ham and the crisp pastry shell, and served with a sharply dressed salad, it is one of my favourite lunches, as good hot from the oven as it is cold. Of course, there are many different variations on quiche fillings, and I don’t pretend this one is authentic or definitive at all – it’s just the one that I cook at home. Once you’ve worked out the amount of pastry and custard that work for your tin, then it’s easy to adapt the filling to what’s in the fridge.

The amount of pastry given will line two quiches – I give double quantities as I don’t like making “just enough” pastry. It’s not that I might muck up rolling it out (this method seems to produce resilient pastry that rolls out brilliantly in even the hottest of kitchens and the clumsiest of hands – i.e. mine), but that having an extra bit of pastry waiting in the fridge isn’t really a problem. Just seeing the little ball of resting pastry opens up all sorts of possibilities that you might not bother with if you had to make pastry from scratch. I’m a fan of using unsweetened pastry even for puddings, especially ones with very sweet fillings such as treacle tart. (The search for the ultimate treacle tart recipe may be a holy grail type quest, or at least deserving of its own blog – but I will at least make a start soon…)

Technorati Tags: baking, cooking, cooking, eggs, food, food and drink, home cooking, pancetta, quiche, recipe

For the pastry (double quantities) (Nigella Lawson’s method)
:
240g flour, I use 00 flour as she suggests
120g butter
a little iced water with a squeeze of lemon

For the quiche:
4 eggs
150g single cream
150g whole milk
3 tablespoons grated cheese

150g cubed pancetta or bacon
1 white onion, chopped
2 tomatoes

1 fairly deep 20cm fluted pie tin, with removable base

About 90 minutes before you want to eat, start making the pastry. Measure the flour into the bowl of a food processor. Add the fat, cold from the fridge in 1cm dice, and bung the bowl in the freezer for 10 minutes. When it comes out, process until it looks like oatmeal. Start adding the iced water a tablespoon at a time, processing in between, and stop just when the mixture looks like it’s all about to start to stick together, but before it actually does (don’t panic, I invariably add more water than was actually needed, and it turns out fine). Then take out the dough, press together, and divide into two halves. Wrap both in clingfilm and into the fridge to rest for half an hour.

While the pastry is resting, preheat the oven to 170°C. When ready, roll out one of the balls and line the quiche tin. Then put in the fridge to rest again for 20 minutes. Sauté the onion in a little olive oil, adding the pancetta after 5 minutes or so, and cook for a further 5 minutes. Remove from the pan and pat with kitchen towel, just to remove some of the extra fat.

Put the tin on a baking tray, for ease of maneuver, and bake blind for 15 minutes, until the pastry is turning golden. I don’t bother to faff around with baking beans and foil, but just prick the base with a fork, more through tradition than rationale, and keep an eye on it during cooking. If you have lined the tin carefully, making sure that the pastry isn’t stretched across the base, then it shouldn’t rise too much during cooking. If it does start to bulge up, I just reach into the oven and gently push it down again with a tea-toweled hand. This works for me, but I’m sure experienced cooks all have their own routine!

In a measuring jug, mix together the eggs, milk, cream and cheese with a fork. Spoon the pancetta and onion mixture onto the pastry, distributing evenly, and pour over the custard. Return to the oven and cook for 30 minutes until the custard has just set and is just browning a little on top. If you like, you can lay some sliced tomatoes on top about half-way into cooking time, when the custard has firmed up enough to support the weight of the slices.

This recipe is taken from:

“The Kitchen Diaries” (Nigel Slater)

It was a super day today up until about half an hour ago. Suddenly the sky has turned grey and cloudy, and the two enormous pine trees outside my window are waving around like crazy. There’s a storm coming, and that means only one thing – an excuse for tea and cake! And all the better if it’s an emergency cake like this that takes, ooh, about 7 minutes to put together before shoving in the oven (and that’s if you bother to do the fiddly bit and line the tin).

I went out especially to buy the ingredients for this cake, but as the recipe points out, all it consists of is a basic cake with equal fat, sugar and flour, topped with any fruit that takes your fancy. The cake underneath rises around the softened fruit, so that you get a tender crumb, made moist by the fruit juices encased in a firmer golden crust around the edges. I had an inspiration – after doing the shopping of course – that blackberry and apple would be gorgeous here, perhaps with a streusel topping sprinkled over too a la Delia Smith – but I’ll just have to wait for the next rainy day to try out that idea! Meanwhile, I’ve got a cuppa to make…

Technorati Tags: baking, blueberry, cake, cooking, dessert, food, food and drink, fruit, home cooking, nigel slater, pear, pudding, recipe, tea

130g butter, at room temp
130g caster sugar
2 eggs, at room temp
130g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
250g blueberries
2 ripe pears

A smallish cake tin - 21cm round, or 21-23cm square, lined on the bottom.

Preheat the oven to 190°C.

Cream the butter and sugar together. Beat the eggs lightly with a fork, and gradually mix them in with the butter and sugar. Sift the flour and baking powder into that bowl and fold in carefully. Spoon into the cake tin and flatten down.

Peel and cube the pears, and mix with the blueberries. Put these on top of the cake mixture, and sprinkle a little more sugar on top. If you care about aesthetics more than I do, try to get a nice even layer of fruit so that the cake rises evenly underneath it, rather than in the little golden hillocks of bare cake I had where I forgot to distribute the blueberries.

Bake for 1 hour, until a skewer comes out clean, leave in the tin for 10 minutes, and then cool on a rack. Oh, who am I kidding – eat it warm with a jug of cream, custard or vanilla ice-cream, ignoring completely your mum’s warning about the effect of hot cake on the tummy.

This recipe is adapted from

“The Kitchen Diaries” (Nigel Slater)
I am a Nigel fangirl, it has to be said. His books contain culinary wisdom and common sense in equal parts, he’s not at all cheffy, he’s rapturous about the crunchy, caramelized bits you get when you’re frying and roasting and there’s a deliciously bitchy undertone in his writing. What’s not to love?

I especially like his joyful use of leftovers. For me, that’s real cooking – being able to stand in front of a practically empty fridge, cast an eye over the chilly depths, and create magic in a pan from what you found. Now that’s a feeling for food. I’m still very much learning this particular skill, but Nige was kind enough to share one of his leftovers tips in his latest book.

If you have some folorn-looking leftover risotto, all you need to do is grab a pan, some fresh herbs and some melty cheese. I used taleggio which is easy to find here in Italy, but you could use any cheese that oozes easily, take your pick. Even some soft blue cheese would be great here.

Chop up a handful of soft herbs – I think parsley’s ideal – and stir into the risotto. Cut the cheese into chunky little cubes about 1.5 cm across. The idea is to encase the cheese inside balls of rice, which you then flatten slightly and fry in a little oil until golden on each side and bursting with the melted cheese.

Take a tablespoon-size scoop of rice into the palm of one hand, flatten and press the cheese into the centre, and then press another smaller scoop of rice on top, so that you create a nice ball of rice covering the cheese in the centre. Continue making balls like this until you use up all the rice. Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a big frying pan, and cook the rice balls, flattening a little, on each side until golden, 4 or 5 minutes on each side – the cheese may start to escape too.

I snarfled three of these for lunch on my own on Saturday (very quickly, hence no photo), so that should be a good guide for how many your rice will feed. They’d be nice with a peppery salad of rocket and watercress.

Technorati Tags: cooking, food, food and drink, home cooking, leftovers, recipe, rice, risotto, vegetarian

I came across the Waiter, there’s something in my pie event (hosted by Cook Sister!) a bit late, but given the trend for pies I thought I’d share this recipe as a) it’s darn tasty and b) it’s incredibly easy. Now, I cheat – I don’t make my own puff pastry. I know that it’s straightforward, especially using a food processor. I’m afraid my excuse is lack of space (very convenient, I know). My kitchen is basically in the understairs cupboard, and consists of one sink, one cooker and one teensy patch of worksurface, so half way into a recipe I just run out of room to put things down in, let along roll pastry out. Plus it’s boiling hot – cupboards don’t have windows remember – so that pretty much kills pastry in any case. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it…

This is a great way to use up any leftover roast chicken and any odd vegetables that might be marauding around the fridge. I used a leek and frozen peas, my mum used to make a garden pie using baby carrots – really, you could make any vegetables work.

Quantities given are for a pie dish that measures 18cm across the narrow base, and serve 2 hungry people.

Technorati Tags: chicken, food, food and drink, home cooking, leek, leftovers, pea, pie, recipe

25g flour
25g butter
300ml whole milk
250g leftover roast chicken meat
1 leek, washed and thinly sliced
150g peas, frozen is fine
1 pack ready rolled puff pastry

Preheat the oven to 190°C.

Sauté the leek and peas in a little butter until tender. You could also steam your vegetables here if you prefer.

Make a white sauce by melting the butter in a pan, then stirring in the flour, cooking this roux for a few minutes. Off the heat, whisk in the milk bit by bit, until smoothly combined. Return to a medium heat, and cook for 10 minutes until the sauce is thickened, creamy and glossy. Season well with salt and pepper, and perhaps a touch of grated nutmeg.

Take the saucepan off the heat, stir in the leftover chicken and cooked vegetables. Butter your pie dish lightly, and add the filling. Dampen the edges of the pie dish with a little milk, and lay the puff pastry on top. Trim the edges, leaving just a little outside the edge, 1/2cm or so, as the pastry will shrink slightly on cooking. Make a few cuts in the pastry with a sharp knife to let steam escape, and then bake in the oven for 30 minutes, until the pastry is golden and the filling is bubbling up. If you have a fierce fan oven which tends to burn pastry easily, just cover the pie with foil for the rest of the cooking time.

I served this with some steamed brussel sprouts, which I adore, but I understand if you choose a different accompaniment!